Impressions of Gutsy (Was: First impressions of dolphin)

[Derek Broughton]

Steve Lamb wrote:

>     Not sure what it was.  This time it didn't show up.  But it did have
> frequency controls and it did have standard the KDE configuration screen.=
>   :/
> 

Yeah, I know there's a kde power applet that does that, but the _default_
one doesn't seem to.

>> I'm pretty confident nothing is spending 800k watching your cd, but in =
> any
>> case you can't rip out any one part of that.  You _can_ turn off the me=
> dia
>> notification daemons in KDE - but I rather doubt you can eliminate the
>> overhead of watching the CD without turning off all USB hotplugging.
> 
>     Er, ps auwx says otherwise:
> 
> 107       4746  0.0  0.4   3260  1188 ?        S    19:03   0:00
> hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/scd0 (every 2 sec)
> 

OK, you seem to be right that hal really _is_ watching, but if you just grep
the hald lines, you'll see that hald-addon-storage is watching far more
than /dev/scd0 with that 2100kb (on my system).  You can't look at ps and
add up the memory fields and come up with the number of bytes actually
being used.  If memory is shared by multiple processes it gets reported for
every process.

>     If all hal is doing is watching USB hotplugging I can rip that out.  =
> Only
> USB port I use on this is for my mouse and that has worked for quite a lo=
> ng
> time prior to hal slipping onto my system.

Just try it - I think you'll find it won't work any more.  Trust me, nothing
works without hal now.
> 
>     Another piece I'd like to remove.  980k to twiddle with my CPUFreq 
>     which is not wanted.  In fact...

_That_ part might be removable just in /etc/hal.  Also, check that you don't
have powernowd installed.  Finally, "locate cpu/cpufreq", then lsmod and
look for any of those modules.  If you find one, rmmod it and blacklist it
in /etc/modprobe.d/ and I'd be really surprised if you can still do cpufreq
adjustments! (and I fully expect hald-addon-cpufreq only to be running if
one of those modules is installed).
> 
> 107       4449  0.0  0.3   2156   876 ?        S    19:03   0:00
> hald-addon-acpi: listening on acpid socket /var/run/acpid.socket
> 
>     ...this doesn't need to be there since I'm not using any power, anoth=
> er 876Kb just wasted.
> 
First, it's not using 876kb, and second acpi is doing a whole lot more than
power.  Sorry, you likely can't live without it.  It monitors temperature
(turning on/off the fans), lids (on laptops), the power button (without
ACPI you may not even be able to turn the machine off), cpu frequency,
AC/Battery/UPS connections, and all special hardware buttons on some
computers (things like audio controls, brightness, sleep).

> 107       4451  0.0  0.3   2156   888 ?        S    19:03   0:00
> hald-addon-keyboard: listening on /dev/input/event6
> 107       4452  0.0  0.3   2156   888 ?        S    19:03   0:00
> hald-addon-keyboard: listening on /dev/input/event7
> 107       4453  0.0  0.3   2160   888 ?        S    19:03   0:00
> hald-addon-keyboard: listening on /dev/input/event8
> 
>     ...and 3 things polling for a keyboard which is hooked in via PS/2.  =
> I'm
> sure all of these are great on modern hardware with memory to spare but o=
> n a
> ol' PIII-750 w/256Mb laptop that sits in a dock all day that's about 6Mb =
> of
> wasted memory.  Ouch.

No, it's 2MB of memory - and even that may well be shared with something
else.

You're trying to micromanage a laptop that is probably doing a fairly good
job of managing itself.  I understand that there's a real problem with the
cpu frequency management, but the rest of it is overhead that (a) you
really can't just tear pieces out of and (b) isn't nearly as much as you
think.
-- 
derek